Okay, she’s definitely insulting the house.
But I don’t care. I still love the house. It doesn’t matter to me what some snooty neighbor thinks.
“So do you work, Millie?” Suzette asks, her blue-green eyes zeroing in on my face.
“I’m a social worker,” I say with a touch of pride. Even though I have been doing it for many years now, I still feel proud of my career. Yes, it can be exhausting, soul wrenching, and the pay is nothing to get excited about. But I still love it. “How about you?”
“I’m a real estate agent,” she says with an equal amount of pride. Ah, that explains the way she was insulting our house in real estate speak. “The market is jumping right now.”
Well, that’s true. It occurs to me now that Suzette was not involved in the sale of this house. If she’s a real estate agent, how come her neighbors didn’t want her to sell their house?
Enzo emerges from the truck, carrying more boxes, his T-shirt still clinging to his chest and his black hair damp. I remember filling one of those boxes with books and being worried that I had made it too heavy. And now he’s carrying not only that box, but he’s put another one on top of it. My back aches just watching him.
Suzette is watching him too. She follows his progress from the moving truck to our front door, a smile spreading across her lips. “Your moving guy is really hot,” she comments.
“Actually,” I say, “that’s my husband.”
Her jaw drops open. Looks like she thinks more of him than she does of the house. “Seriously?”
“Uh-huh.” Enzo has deposited the boxes in the living room, and he is coming out of the house for more. How does he have the energy? Before he reaches the truck, I wave him over. “Enzo, come meet our new neighbor, Suzette.”
Suzette quickly tugs at her blouse and tucks a strand of butterscotch hair behind her ear. If she could, I’m pretty sure she would have given herself a quick once-over in a compact mirror and refreshed her lipstick. But there’s no time for that.
“Hello!” she gushes with an outstretched hand. “It’s so nice to meet you! Enzo, is it?”
He takes her hand and flashes her a broad smile that makes the lines around his eyes crinkle. “Yes, I am Enzo. And you are Suzette?”
She giggles and nods eagerly. Her reaction is a bit over the top, but to be fair, he is turning up the charm. My husband has lived in this country for twenty years, and when we talk at the dinner table, his accent is relatively mild. But when he’s trying to be charming, he turns up his accent so that he sounds like he’s right off the boat. Or as he would say, “right off boat.”
“You are absolutely going to love it here,” Suzette assures us. “It’s such a quiet little cul-de-sac.”
“We already love it,” I say.
“And your house is so cute,” she says, finding yet another creative way to point out that our house is substantially smaller than hers. “It will be perfect for you and your kids, especially with another little one on the way.”
When she says that, she looks pointedly at my abdomen, which definitely does not contain any little ones on the way. There have not been any little ones in there for nine years.
The worst part is that Enzo swivels his head to look at me, and for a second, there’s a glimmer of excitement on his face, even though he knows very well that I had my tubes tied during my emergency C-section with Nico. I look down at my belly, and I notice that my shirt does bulge in an unfortunate way. I’m dying a little bit inside.
“I’m not pregnant,” I say, for both the benefit of Suzette and apparently also my husband.
Suzette clasps a hand over her red lipstick. “Oh dear, I am so sorry! I just assumed…”
“It’s okay,” I say, cutting her off before she makes it worse. Honestly, I love my body. When I was in my twenties, I was a stick figure, but now I finally have some womanly curves to show off, and I daresay my husband seems to enjoy them as well.
That said, I’m throwing away this shirt.
“We have two children.” Enzo flings an arm around my shoulders, oblivious to Suzette’s insult. “Our son, Nico, and our daughter, Ada.”
Enzo couldn’t be more proud of our two children. He’s a great father, and he would have wanted another five of them if I hadn’t nearly died giving birth to our son. We would have loved to adopt or do foster care, but with my background, it was out of the question.
“Do you have children, Suzette?” I ask.
She shakes her head, a horrified look on her face. “Absolutely not. I’m not the maternal type. It’s just me and my husband, Jonathan. We are happily childfree.”
Excellent—she has a husband of her own. She can stay away from mine.
“But there is a little boy in the house across from yours,” she says. “He’s in third grade.”
“Nico is in third grade too,” Enzo says eagerly. “Maybe we can introduce them?”
When we moved, we had to pull the kids out of school right in the middle of the year. Trust me—the last thing you want to do is yank two grade-school-age kids out of their classes in the middle of March. I was racked with guilt, but we couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage and the rent until the end of the school year, so we didn’t have a choice.
Nico, who is outgoing like his father, didn’t seem bothered by it. For Nico, a whole room full of new kids to impress with his antics would be a fun adventure. Ada took the news calmly, but later I found her crying in her room at the thought of leaving her two best friends behind. I’m hoping by the fall, they will both be settled in and the trauma of moving in the middle of the school year will be a distant memory.
“You can try to introduce yourself to them.” Suzette shrugs. “But the woman who lives there, Janice, is not very friendly. She hardly ever comes out of the house except to bring her son to the bus stop. I mostly just see her in the window, staring out at the street. Such a busybody.”
“Oh,” I say, wondering how Janice can apparently never leave her house yet also be so nosy.
I look across the way at 13 Locust. The windows all look dark, despite the fact that it’s the middle of the day and the people who live there seem to be home.
“I hope you’re getting some good blinds for your windows,” she tells me. “Because she has a great view.”
Enzo and I simultaneously rotate our heads in the direction of our brand-new house, the realization suddenly dawning on us that not one of the windows in the entire house has blinds or curtains. How did we not realize that? Nobody told us we needed to buy blinds! Every home we ever lived in before now came with them already installed!
“I will buy blinds,” Enzo murmurs in my ear.
“Thank you.”
